Tag Archives: business

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Overcome the Fear of Speaking

Guest Post By the Queen of Sales Conversion
Lisa Sasevich

Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about the fear of public speaking that goes like this: “I saw a study that said speaking in front of a crowd is the number one fear of the average person. Number two was death. This means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.”

If this sentiment applies to you, don’t worry. I have worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and I can tell you with absolute certainty, you already have everything you need to overcome your fear of public speaking.

The first thing I want you to know about public speaking is that it is not a unique talent. It is a skill that you can learn, and master with practice. Think of the best speaker you’ve ever seen. They were not always that good. They struggled, they learned, they honed their craft. They become a great speaker. They weren’t born that way. In fact, when they were born, I can assure you they couldn’t speak at all.

If you truly want to overcome your fear of speaking, you can. And these tips will help you do it.

Build Confidence By Controlling Your Environment
You don’t have to give your first speech as the commencement address at your Alma Mater or as the keynote speaker at a large conference. When you are talking about your business or your passion to a group that wants to hear what you have to say, you are SPEAKING.

This speaking can take place in your living room with five people, on a conference call, as part of a group meeting, or online through a webinar. Starting in one of these environments, whichever one makes you feel the most at ease, is a great first step to overcoming your fear.

Imagination NOT required
Overcoming your fear of public speaking is not about convincing yourself of an alternate reality. You don’t need to picture the audience in their underwear or visualize yourself on stage as the confident speaker you one day will be.

Becoming a confident speaker is all about your message, and your message is already in you. It is your truth. But you convey so much more than your words when you are speaking. Your body language is key.

By learning and using body language that projects comfort and confidence to your audience, you can start to feel that confidence grow in you. Your confidence can come, at least in part, from the outside in.

Prepare, prepare, prepare
I’m usually not one to use a sports analogy, but my marketing director told me that basketball coach Bob Knight once said, “The key is not the will to win. Everybody has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that’s important.” And that seemed kind of perfect to me.

You see, the same is true of public speaking. Wanting to be a great public speaker isn’t enough. It’s really all about the preparation. But how do you prepare?

First, know your audience and craft your message to them. Speak in a way that is comfortable and natural for you, but in a language they can understand, and make sure you are addressing their needs and not just your own. If your message is clear and it resonates with them, you will feel that as you speak and it will make you more confident and comfortable.

Second, anticipate resistance and prepare to meet it. Find the most likely objections to your message and know how you are going to answer those objections.

Meeting obstacles you didn’t expect is nerve-wracking, but if you’ve anticipated the obstacle, encountering it can be comforting and reinforces your total mastery of what you are presenting.

Third, focus on how great your talk is, not how long your talk is. Everyone in your audience would prefer an excellent 45-minutes to a mediocre 90-minutes. They would also prefer an excellent 90-minutes to a mediocre 45-minutes. It’s not about the length, it’s about the quality. Every time.

In addition – and I can’t emphasize this enough – practice. Practice in front of a mirror, or on video, or with a colleague who can give you feedback. This can be really helpful in identifying all the ways you are communicating when you speak; your tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, ums, uhs, crutch words, or jargon.

All of these are more easily identified and improved upon with an outside point of view.

And finally, know your space. By arriving early and getting comfortable in the room you remove an unknown, which will make you feel much more at ease. Take some time in the room before the crowd arrives to just be in the space, to breathe in the space. This will help to prepare your body and mind since you’ve already prepared your presentation.

Practice Self-Care
Taking the time to take care of yourself is crucial to both the health of your business and to your quality of life but it’s especially important for overcoming your fear of public speaking.

It’s very hard to master something new when you are feeling tired, irritable, stressed, or forgetful. You’ve done the work of preparing your presentation. You are the expert in the room and are the only one who can deliver your message. Now take some time to relax and feel refreshed so you can do your best.

You’ve taken care of the work, now take care of you.

And after it’s done, take some time to reflect. Muscles are built in the rest time after the workout. The same is true for learning from what you’ve done. In quiet reflection after a presentation is when you learn the lessons of that experience.

Be Yourself!
Remember that what you are offering when you speak is yourself. You are giving your audience the gift of your experience and perspective. They want the real you!

Which is great, since there’s no one else you’re more prepared to be. You’ve been you for a long time!

Bring your authentic self and let your personality shine through.

There are two ways that speakers tend to short-circuit their own authenticity.

First, by trying to wing it. Gaining speaking confidence is all about being prepared and the more prepared you are to deliver the content of your speech, the more your true personality can shine through.

Second, by over-scripting what you’re going to say. The pendulum swings both ways – creating rigidity and over-scripting makes it easier to get thrown off if someone asks a question you were going to talk about later, or you understand that the room isn’t responding to something, or if the projector breaks or the mic goes out. Know your content and be comfortable with your delivery, but avoid getting locked into reading off a prepared script.

Prepare For Things To Go Wrong
Breathe.

Breathe again.

There. Good. If you speak long enough something will go wrong. It’s ok. It happens to all of us.

Take some time in your preparation to think through how you’ll respond if something doesn’t go as planned. If you’ve thought about it already it will be less of a surprise if it happens.

The important part isn’t that something went wrong, the important part is how you respond. Here are a few things you can do to master your response.

Don’t take it personally. The laptop going out isn’t the will of the universe directed at your presentation. Keep cool. Breathe. You know what you’re going say and you know it’s worth hearing. This won’t derail you. You’ve got this!

Find the humor in the situation. Your audience is going to feel bad for you when something goes wrong. They’ll tense up on your behalf. If you can relax into it, find the humor and keep it light, they will feed off your positive energy and you’ll all ride the storm out.

Stick to your plan. You’ve prepared for this presentation. You know your stuff. You know it will work the way you’ve planned it. Do what you had already planned to do and you’ll be just fine.

If you enjoyed this content, Lisa Sasevich is releasing a complimentary online training series chocked full of resources like this designed to support you on your business building journey. Check it out here.

Irresistible Offers

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Why Every New Entrepreneur Should Start Speaking

Guest Article By the Queen of Sales Conversion
Lisa Sasevich

As a heart-centered entrepreneur, whether you are launching a new business, or trying to make the quantum leap you know you are capable of, you have an incredibly powerful tool at your disposal that costs you nothing and is uniquely yours: your voice.

By using your experience, your expertise, and your voice to speak to groups, either large or small, you can build a solid foundation and kick-start your growth.

What Is Speaking?
Let’s get rid of a few misconceptions first.

First, we aren’t talking about The State of the Union or a Commencement Address here. Speaking does not have to be done in a formal or lavish setting for it to be effective. In fact, as an entrepreneur, expert, or business owner, you use your speaking skills in multiple contexts every day.

The same speaking skills you use to convey your message to a small group gathered in your living room are the same ones you use in a conference room, creating a webinar, participating in a conference call, or up on stage in front of hundreds of attendees who have paid to hear your message.

Second, contrary to what your fears are telling you, you don’t have to be an extrovert or love getting up in front of a crowd to speak. There are a lot of tools you can use to make you feel more comfortable. You can effectively deliver your message in a video, a webinar, or over the phone. (Ladies, you don’t even have to do your hair for these ones!)

Remember, whenever you are talking about your business or your passion to a group that wants to hear what you have to say, you are SPEAKING.

Why speak?
You have something to say that no one else can.

The combination of your experience, knowledge, and perspective is unique to you and the world is clamoring for people who can speak authentically to those experiences.

Boost your visibility
By speaking you make yourself more visible to the world in a way that is more personal, accessible, and impactful than any writing or social media following you can create.

Boost your credibility
When you are just starting out, you have the expertise to help your clients, but you lack the track record of successes and overjoyed customer testimonials that help convince people that you are the solution to their problems. When they see you speak they see you for who you are, an expert.

Boost your profitability
Speaking is one of the cost effective ways you can add new business. You already have your ideas, experience, and voice. And for those of us who sometimes struggle with the technology side of thing (guilty!), speaking is perfect. You just need you, them, and a room.

Propel growth
One of the quickest and best ways to grow your business quickly is to speak to as many potential customers as possible. By speaking you can turn audience members into customers and into referrals for other speaking engagements where you can turn more audience members into more customers and more referrals. Oh, Imagine the growth!

Leverage time
The one thing you never have enough of as an entrepreneur is time. Speaking allows you to tell your story once and have it heard by as many people as can fit in the room. And if you’ve recorded your message, that same message can be seen and heard by the whole world.

But the best part of speaking is that you don’t have to go out looking for prospective customers, because they are already there.

In that 30 minutes or 1 hour, you have spoken directly to a group of people who wanted to hear what you have to say and are now ready to act. What’s a better use of your time than that?

Make Your Irresistible Offer
What separates a conversation about your passion into an opportunity to sell your services to your engaged and interested audience is your offer. Your presentation should be a gateway to your offer. When people hear your message and the passion you have for what you are offering right from your mouth, you can make your offer irresistible.

Make a Great Speech
How can you ensure that you’ve put together a great speech that is going to not only get people in the door, but have them leaving excited by your message?

1. Create a Great Talk Title
Your ability to deliver a great speech that turns into a sale starts with a Great Talk Title. Let your audience know not only what the talk is about, but how it will benefit them. The magic doesn’t happen at the end, but at the beginning and your Talk title begins to plant the seeds for your eventual success.

2. Create a Speaker Summary Sheet
Your summary sheet is a short biography of you, a summary of your talk (250 words, max! Keep it short), and your picture. This can be sent to organizations you want to speak to. You should also include a speaker introduction that the host can read when they are introducing you to the room.

3. Sizzle Reel
Your sizzle reel is a short video introducing yourself to your audience. It’s your trailer, press kit, speaker one-sheet, and bio … all wrapped into one powerful video. This is not something you need right away but keep your eye out for opportunities to catch this footage when you can.
Speaking from your heart always feels amazing. Speaking from your heart and actually turning that into sales feels even more amazing.

4. And finally, follow my Five-Step Formula SPEAK

-> S – stands for Speak. You must learn to speak in a clear and concise way to convey the unique value that only you provide. For example, I help entrepreneurs sell without being salesy. Pretty clear, right?
-> P – stands for Position yourself as the expert. You know more about your subject matter than anyone in the room. Own that! You are the expert in your category.
-> E- stands for Expect Resistance from the outside as well as the inside. When you’re moving forward, you are going to experience resistance. And that’s a good thing! Resist the urge to stop or slow down. Lean into the resistance!
-> A – stands for Authority. No one grants you the authority to be who you are! No one knocked on my door and said, “Hey, Lisa, here’s the crown. You’re the Queen of Sales Conversion.” That is who I am. I crowned myself!
-> K – stands for Knowing. Your intuition is strong and accurate. You already know. Stop second guessing yourself. You know what to do at any given moment.

If you enjoyed this content, Lisa Sasevich is releasing a complimentary online training series chocked full of resources like this designed to support you on your business building journey. Check it out here.

108 Places to Speak Directory
108 Places to Speak Resource

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Appointed as an eWomen Network Ambassador

I am pleased to announce that I have been appointed to the leadership team as an eWomen Network Ambassador for the Toronto Chapter. I will be working with a talented leadership team to support women entrepreneurs and corporate professionals in the Greater Toronto Area. The eWomen Network is one of North America’s premier women’s business and professional organizations.

If you are an entrepreneur (or corporate professional) who is looking for opportunities to grow your business and network, look no further than the eWomen Network. The eWomen Network has many benefits that can support you as you grow your business. The organization consists of women who support each other while growing their businesses and giving back to the community. If you are interested in joining the eWomen Network, please contact me for further information at deborah@deborahangelaustin.com

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Interviewed on The Brave Entrepreneur Podcast

My interview with branding expert Jena Rodriguez is now live on itunes. Jena Rodriguez is a brand strategist, national speaker, author, and founder of Brand With Jena based out of Texas. She interviewed me for her podcast: The Brave Entrepreneur where she discusses how entrepreneurs can be brave in both business and in life.

In the interview, we discussed how people can step into their authentic power as entrepreneurs and professionals. I discuss tips to be an effective speaker and why you should no longer put your dreams on hold. The time to start working on your dreams and goals is now! It was an honour to be interviewed.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE PODCAST:
The Brave Entrepreneur Interview

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Join Associations Like eWomen Network

When you are embarking on a new endeavour in life, it makes sense for you to join groups, associations and organizations to learn from people who are further along the path in terms of where you ultimately want to be. In my life, I’ve been blessed to have mentors who have shared their time, wisdom and experience with me to help me grow in different areas. In turn, I’ve mentored and coached people along their life’s journey in specific areas.

I recently joined the eWomen Network (Toronto Chapter) an organization that supports women entrepreneurs through events, networking, and other resources. The eWomen Network was started by Sandra and Kym Yancey over 15 years ago and has chapters across North America. Each chapter is unique and the members come together to network, learn, support and make business connections with each other.

I’m inspired by the members that I’ve met at the Toronto Chapter who have encouraged me. Thank you especially to Daniela, the Managing Director of the eWomen Network (Toronto Chapter) who is inspirational, has encouraged me with words of wisdom and has been supportive as I move forward along the path of my entrepreneurial journey.

If you are interested in learning more about the eWomen Network please feel free to email me at deborah@deborahangelaustin.com.

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Are You Ready to Pay the Price for High Level Results?

When it comes to achieving success, do you truly believe that successful people are just lucky, rich, had the right breaks, are attractive, or have a great network to leverage? All of which may or may not be true. There may be a percentage of people who have achieved success the so called easy way (what way that is, I don’t know).

The reality is that the majority of successful people have worked hard to attain success.  And yes, they may have leveraged their personal and professional connections, their education, financial resources and “lucky breaks” (also known as opportunities) that came along to achieve their success.  They also would have worked hard, set goals, overcome obstacles and pursued their goals with  tenacity.

Think about yourself for a moment and the skills that you’ve developed throughout your life.  Whether it was for a new venture,  learning a new language or instrument, or learning how to parent, wasn’t there hard work involved to be successful in that specific area. There was a major commitment of time, energy and money to study, train  and gain the required experience and skills necessary to be successful. You may have “failed” or have been unsuccessful several times before mastering the skill you needed to learn. If learning the skill or achieving the goal was important enough to you, I bet you did the required work to learn the skill or achieve the goal. In other words you “paid the price.”

The truth is some people just aren’t willing to do the hard work required to achieve high level results. For example, if you want to have a bikini ready body, that would mean that you would have to workout consistently (at least one hour per day, maybe more),  eat a healthy diet on a regular basis and forgo many high calorie treats. Some people are just not willing to do that type of work to obtain that type of body. Which is perfectly fine. What about being an entrepreneur?

Being an entrepreneur involves long work hours, reduced family time, and unpredictable income with no guarantee of success. All of which are totally reasonable in the entrepreneur’s mind (at least in the short term) because having a successful business will eventually lead to (in the future) more financial freedom, more family time and possibly living a location independent lifestyle. With up to 80 percent of small businesses failing within 18 months (according to Bloomberg), the majority of people aren’t willing to do the hard work required to become a successful entrepreneur. They don’t want to gamble with their time, family or financial resources, which is perfectly understandable. The rewards though for the successful entrepreneur can be substantial so the work involved to achieve that success is more than justified.

The next time you encounter successful people who you believe have obtained success (or a specific result that you want) the so called easy way or “overnight,” reflect and think about what really went into building that success. The answers you come up with will be very illuminating. As an exercise, creatively reverse engineer how the successful person achieved that high level result by working backwards. For example, if an actor you like won an Academy Award and you have acting aspirations, what are the steps that would have led him or her to that stage? If someone you know just launched a tech start-up, what are the steps required to launch a tech business? If you know someone who is an outstanding parent who has raised children who are now wonderful adults, what are some parenting strategies you could adopt that can help you with your young children.  When you do an exercise like this you soon realize that behind any successful person there are many factors that contribute to their success. It was rarely “easy.”

Success is not achieved in a vacuum. There are many factors that contribute to being successful in life. Many successful people had to study, train, gain experience and fail many times before achieving their definition of success. In fact, failing numerous times is a common trait among successful people. The difference is successful people do not allow their failures to define them or allow failures to distract them from achieving their ultimate goals and dreams. People who are successful and achieve high level results think and act differently when it comes to commitment, discipline, focus, surmounting obstacles and pursuing their goals with determination. The so called, “Overnight Success” rarely is and has worked for years (often decades) setting the foundation for the success that they end up bringing to fruition.

In a future post, I look forward  to examining  the mindset of  successful people and high achievers. I look forward to sharing tips with you on how you can learn to develop that mindset.

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